Annette Wentworth
Remembering otherwise will proceed from those practices of remembrance whose overriding consideration is the question of what it might mean to take the memories of others (memories formed in other times and spaces) into our lives and so live as though the lives of others mattered. (Roger Simon, in The touch of the past: Remembrance, learning and ethics)[1]
Introduction
In his important book Clearing the plains: Disease, politics of starvation, and the loss of Aboriginal life (2013), James William Daschuk writes, ‘Health as a measure of human experience cannot be considered in isolation from the social and economic forces that shape it.[2] He details how disease, colonisation and racism intersected in an attempt to destroy Indigenous life in the building of what we now call Canada. It is an imbrication that can be found around the world in the history of postcolonial nations. In this essay, I argue for memory practices that include the memory of mass death due to diseases that have often been the result of intersecting forces of racism, sexism and colonisation, with a focus on the millions who died because of HIV/AIDS in South Africa in the early 2000s.
In South Africa centuries of colonisation and the implementation of apartheid legislation from 1948 to 1994, left the country with ongoing colonial social, cultural and economic structures that contributed to what soon became the worst HIV/AIDS pandemic in the world. Among them are the entrenchment of gender-based violence, colonial and apartheid-era mass relocations of communities, and the creation of enormously disparate conditions between the rural and urban areas.[3] As a result of these ongoing conditions and a decade of denial by the post-apartheid government, seven million people had died of AIDS in South Africa by the end of 2009, when treatment became more widely available.
I will outline possible reasons why South Africa failed to address the disease, and continuously fails to recognise or commemorate the enormous suffering and loss of life that it caused, arguing that the continued disavowal of the experiences of Black women in particular—who are disproportionately infected and affected—is an ongoing silencing that urgently needs attention. Against the conditions of mass death, women in community groups around the country made art against AIDS and against the erasure of their lives and the story of their losses. One of the most monumental, ambitious and meaningful works is called the Keiskamma Altarpiece (Figs. 2,3,4) created by a group of mostly women in the Eastern Cape, one of the areas in the country most devastated by the disease. I ‘read’ the Altarpiece as testimony and storytelling against the shaming and silencing of women’s lives and experiences in South Africa, and argue that it calls us to become response-able to its witness.
Remembrance practices anywhere are subject to ongoing negotiations, to our ability and willingness to listen and respond, and to whom. I follow curriculum scholar Roger Simon’s urging for a remembrance for social justice now and for the future. There is a pedagogical urgency to hold onto the traces of traumatic histories, to those who witness to them. Simon’s conception of this is remembrance-ful of the responsibility of learning to live with loss, and to build a community of the living and the disregarded dead, to bring the dead back into presence. The Keiskamma Altarpiece stands as bold witness to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa and to its millions of unrecounted lives and deaths. It asks us to remember otherwise, to be response-able to its testimony, and to take its memories ‘into our lives and so live as though the lives of others mattered.’[4]
Women and silencing
Black women have borne the brunt of multiple oppressions throughout South Africa’s history. Among them are gender-based violence, restrictions on movements and limited access to education and employment. Already made vulnerable in multiple ways, and for several generations, Black women then were made to carry the burden of this—literally—unspeakable disease. The majority of people infected and affected by AIDS are women, who are socially and even physiologically more vulnerable than their male peers. Systemic racialised gender-based violence—a colonial and apartheid inheritance—contribute to this disparity as well, as South Africa has some of the world’s highest rates of rape in the world.[5] In addition, women bear the burden of care for both the ill and those orphaned by AIDS, of which South Africa has nearly five million. Against the ongoing structures of violence and oppression entrenched in South Africa since colonial times, Black women suffer, are silenced, and—during the HIV/AIDS pandemic—are shamed and stigmatised. When communities began to be devastated by the disease, women were often blamed for its presence, thrown out of their homes, had their children taken away and were denied medical treatment and care.[6]
Marginalised by their sex, class and health status, Black women—particularly in rural areas of South Africa—live at the far borders of the country’s mainstream narrative.[7] But this is, of course, not the whole story; these are statistics of suffering, and there is unrecounted strength and resistance to the silencing of shame, and of death. And while the country still largely does not recognise, or mourn, the staggering loss of life due to HIV/AIDS, there are groups who have marked their experiences and told their survival stories in creative and powerful ways. Black women in South Africa have resisted and persisted and the group of women at the heart of this article is one that has worked to story their lives in creative and astonishing works of art.[8]
HIV/AIDS and the building of a new South Africa
Foundational to the notion of remembering otherwise is not only the adjudication of responsibility and the provision of just reparation: it also includes the production of a historical imaginary within which it is possible to rethink as sensible and justifiable those practices which establish one peoples’ exploitation, dominion, or indifference with regard to others (Roger Simon, The touch of the past: Remembrance, learning and ethics)[9]
During the first few decades of post-apartheid South Africa, underground while the country transitioned to democratic rule, and unheeded while the Truth and Reconciliation proceedings were broadcast nationwide, HIV spread through the population at a ruthless pace. Earlier generations of South Africans had lived through decades of racialised violence under the apartheid regime and centuries of colonisation. South Africa was grappling with the enormous losses sustained during those decades, but when AIDS could no longer be ignored, it was then actively denied by the government, most adamantly by President Thabo Mbeki.
Kylie Thomas discusses this time period in her 2014 book, Impossible mourning, HIV/AIDs and visuality after apartheid. She notes that the discourses that shaped the post-apartheid years were predominantly about healing the wounds of the past, reconciliation, and the dawn of an African Renaissance: discourses at odds with what the majority of South Africans who were living with HIV/AIDS were dealing with as the newly (re)marginalised in the forging of a new South African story. There was an overriding and carefully controlled discourse of healing that was prevalent during the Truth and Reconciliation commission.[10] Unacknowledged, untended HIV/AIDS and the suffering that went with it, ran counter to the project of healing the nation, and this undermined voices that were—even then belatedly—raising awareness of it. Thomas writes about the incredible disjuncture she felt as she watched the government working on a new constitution to shape the future, while refusing to provide treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS.[11]
Lisa Farley argues for ‘a theory of education that articulates what is hopeful about the capacity to tolerate the disillusionment of both learning from and living in difficult times.’[12] In thinking through the ongoing invisibility of people living with HIV/AIDS and the lack of remembrance or commemorations of the massive loss of life that has already been a result of the pandemic, I suggest that it is precisely because South Africa did not have the capacity—during the first and then the worst years of the crisis, and perhaps it still does not—to tolerate the kind of profound disillusionment that Farley talks about. South Africa was building a new nation. There was no room, no time and no tolerance for the embodied disillusionment that is disease. It was impossible, perhaps, for the country to allow itself—or to admit to—suffering, to being wounded again, when the deep wounds of apartheid had barely formed a scab.
Memory studies scholar Jan Assmann describes how cultural memory often works when it is created and used for political purposes and ideologies, points that are apt in the missing story of AIDS in South Africa. Nation states make memory, she describes, in order to construct a particular identity, based on what and/or who is selected and excluded, ‘neatly separating useful from not useful, and relevant from irrelevant memories.’ Specifically discussing the ways in which nations use and abuse memory and remembrance practices in the building of memory, Assmann says, ‘only those historical referents were selected which strengthened a positive self- image and supported specific goals for the future. What did not fit into the heroic pattern was passed over and forgotten.’[13]
Grievable and ungrievable lives
The new South Africa was interested in portraying its strength in the remembrance of its martyrs and activists, not in those who might be seen as victims, or passive, as ‘there is no sacrifice involved in the case of traumatic memory, a fact which distinguishes it from traditional forms of heroic memory.’[14] Therefore, ‘the memory of victims is always contested . . . [I]t has to be established against the pressure of a dominant memory.’[15] In the case of AIDS in South Africa, the memory of victims pushes back against an active and dominant forgetting as well as a longstanding ignore-ance.
I argue that to be diseased is so often to be dis-remembered, dis-embodied, unseen both in life and in death. In her 2016 book, Frames of War: When is life grievable? leading feminist thinker Judith Butler writes that, for lives to be mourned, they need first to be recognised—as human lives. She asks us to think about whose lives are valued, whose lives are considered to be lives, who counts, who cares, and why: ‘An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives.’[16] I think it is safe to say that the lives being lost by the hundreds of thousands each year in South Africa,[17] when life-saving treatment was widely available in other parts of the world, were not valued, were perhaps not even viewed as lives in the first place. Marked as publicly ungrievable,[18] they were unseen and unheard, not known or recounted. They were even miscounted, as recent studies have found that over 90 percent of deaths recorded in South Africa from 1996–2009 were mis-classified and the numbers of South Africans who died because of AIDS ranges from the ‘official’ 4 million to 7 million.[19] The mass death that was a result of the AIDS pandemic in Africa continues to be ignored both internationally and in South Africa, where the largest HIV-infected and -affected population in the world still live, and still die.
Women and community art
In a place and time where so much about the crisis of the epidemic is made invisible and so much painful history remains repressed, the work of visual artists takes on a particular significance. (Kylie Thomas, Impossible Mourning: HIV/AIDS and visuality after apartheid)[20]
In the rural Eastern Cape of South Africa one artwork in particular stands towering against centuries of oppression and the silencing of women’s lives, in monumental and impossible-to-ignore proportions. The Keiskamma Altarpiece, created by about 100 women and a few men from the villages of Bodiam, Bell and Hamburg, along the Keiskamma river, speaks once-silenced names and stories through what has been traditionally women’s handiwork—the ordinary stitch. But here the ordinary is made extraordinary.
The Keiskamma Art Project was initially started as a means to offer employment and income to women in the village. Carol Baker, originally from Johannesburg, began the initiative around 2000 and remains involved today. Baker is both a medical doctor by training and a fine artist (as an artist, she uses her married name, Carol Hofmeyr). Annie Coombes has pointed out that throughout the years of HIV/AIDS denialism, in particular from about 1999–2006, many community arts groups around the country worked to educate people about HIV/AIDS.[21] However, in this area of the country, the dearth of income generating opportunities, particularly for women, combined with the mounting losses ensuing from the pandemic, forced the Art Project to evolve quickly into a multi-layered project called the Keiskamma Trust, that soon incorporated HIV/AIDS education and treatment, hospice care, nutritional supports, and education programs. For many years the Trust was the only organisation consistently providing anti-retro-viral treatment for hundreds of people in remote areas, while advocating for the Department of Health to respond.
Baker enlisted the traditional skills of women to embroider and to sew, led by a core group who lived in three adjoining villages: Nozeti Makhubalo, Nombuyiselo Malumbeso, Ndileka Mapuma, Nomfusi Nkani, Nokupiwe Gedze, Caroline Nyongo, and Cebo Mvubu. Together they embarked on various projects and piece work, detailing the history of South Africa, before the Keiskamma Altarpiece was created in 2005. Many women who collaborated on these early projects are still involved today, nearly two decades later, and hundreds more have been employed by the Art Project through the years. The longevity of this group and the overwhelming testimony of its members to the empowering nature of their collaboration[22] has its deepest roots in the creation of the Keiskamma Altarpiece.
Embroidery is traditionally women’s work, and women in South Africa have used it in various ways to witness to their lived experiences.[23] Women have always been at the heart of the Art Project, taking ownership even of what is a traditionally male purview by adopting as their logo a cow, hand-stitched, thus subverting what is traditionally off-limits for women and taking its rich cultural significance and power as their own. The Altarpiece proved to their patriarchal community that women have a voice of their own and with its monumental proportions of nearly 7 metres wide and 4 metres high, their work has a force and a presence that cannot be denied.
The inspiration for the piece, the Isenheim Altarpiece, was introduced to them by Baker, who had been struck by the artwork—specifically the central image of the first panel of Christ on the cross, said to be one of the most detailed images of suffering in Western European art history. The Isenheim is a sixteenth century work by Matthias Grünewald, of the same proportions as the South African version, and they both open from the centre to unfold two other layers beneath the first. The Isenheim was commissioned by an order of Antonite monks, to be housed in a monastery that acted as a hospice for people suffering from what was then an unknown and incurable disease. The sores on the bodies of people with HIV/AIDS reminded Baker of Grünewald’s Christ, and she showed the women of the Art Project the images and described the context. Across time and place, a dialogue through artmaking between two suffering communities became the Keiskamma Altarpiece.
The Isenheim, in Colmar, France, was visited several times by the writer John Berger who, in an essay written in 1973, described the first panels as exposing ‘the felt anatomy of pain’[24] The power of the painting, Berger suggested, was in the empathy that Grünewald must have felt for the dying around him, and for whom he painted, as the body of Christ was painted ‘inch by inch’ in a rapture of attention and compassion that has long been a prime painted example of suffering. I suggest that if Grünewald painted his altarpiece inch by inch, the Keiskamma Altarpiece was embroidered—not by observant hands only—but by afflicted hands as well, stitch by stitch. This, the South African version, was made to bear the felt anatomy of pain as well. It was made with the care-ful attentiveness that caregivers have to the ill, or the too-often bereaved: by hands that know intimately the pain of holding onto the dying; by the hands of women to whom the pricks of embroidery needles barely register the sting. Each stitch carries the felt experience of the losses each woman bears. And, in every stitch, a voice—out of silence.
The Keiskamma Altarpiece
While the Keiskamma Altarpiece has largely been seen as a work of hope in the face of HIV/AIDS and a testament to the resilience of women, in particular grandmothers, I read the Altarpiece as a storytelling project. This story is told by women about women. It is a monument to the grief of women, a witness to the dead, and to the desire for abundant life and living. It is a work of mourning, of memory, of dreams and of resistance. Women’s lives are told out loud and much larger than life. The Keiskamma Altarpiece overwhelms any space it inhabits: it towers, is unwieldy; it unsettles and interrupts, is impossible to ignore. Roger Simon urges us to be attentive to moments when we encounter testament: if we are, we are always shaken, and addressed—called to be response-able.[25]
In the first central panels, the nearly naked figure of Christ on the Isenheim, broken on the cross, is replaced by a woman, a widow in the traditional blue clothes of mourning. The cross is a shadow behind her, though she is stiff as wood in her grief. She is surrounded by other women who join her in suffering, and they are in turn surrounded by children, the orphaned-by-AIDS, of which South Africa has millions. The threads of this panel are sombre colors, the faces of the women are blank. The stitched images that serve as a backdrop to this central scene depict ordinary village life: there are cattle, chickens, a donkey or two. Then: a detailed and abstract section behind the grieving women, as though words, images failed the women stitching that section. Angel-spirits fly around the widow’s head. Off to the side, behind the orphans, like a ghost echoing the emaciated Christ of the medieval altarpiece, is a shrunken naked body, arms splayed out from its sides in a gesture that seems to plead with the viewer, asking to be seen, to be noticed.
Almost every part of the enormous surface of these first panels is intricate. Intimate. The stitches are varied, in all manner of flowing lines and designs. Each person stitched has an entirely unique appearance; their clothes are detailed dramatically, particularly in contrast to their faces, which look like masks, emptied of life. These first panels must have taken the most time for the women to make as the details are care-filled, thoughtful and personal, with women bringing bits of material from their own homes to integrate into the tapestry. A spirit of heaviness lingers, as one must linger long on these first pages of the story, each woman bringing their own losses to bear on this monument to the dead, to their dead.
Anchoring the ‘pages’ of the Altarpiece is the predella: in the Isenheim it is taken up by the dead body of Christ and those who mourn him. Here in the South African work, death is displayed in detail: rows of coffins, a local clinic, a hospice, a funeral procession and a large casket close to the centre. This is a scene from a recent death in the village: of Dumile, the son of Susan Paliso, who stands in stitch in the first panels and is photographed with her grandson, the son of this dead man, in the last panels. A body, tormented and covered in sores is one of the largest figures, to the left of the scene. This predella is static; it doesn’t move or open but stands underlying all the other images on the Altarpiece. It acts as a refrain to the rest of the stories here, a reminder that this suffering and death remains and is unrelenting.
Two women replace the medieval male saints who flank the central panels. They take up the entire frames, unlike the original saints, who are surrounded by scenery that clarifies their identities for the original viewers. Rather than the suffering Saint Sebastian, there is Susan Paliso, her clothes as wild and imaginative as she is. Here, she wears an elaborate hat, a shawl, and a skirt of many colors and fabrics. Unlike the swooning Sebastian, Susan stands solidly and sure of herself. Her face is elaborately stitched, as is her counterpart on the opposite side, Leginah Mapuma, in her church uniform, cane and black boots. Her aged face is a detailed and worn map, a maze of the complicated life and times she has lived through, and survived. Both ‘saints’ are ordinary women. And yet they are not ordinary women at all. As Black South African women they have endured displacement, abuse, extreme poverty, the deaths of children and a terrifying disease. They are here, though, and toweringly so: resisting anonymity, oppression and ignore-ance. Here, in this enormous, book-like, embroidered artwork, they are unmistakable in their agency and their prominent position, subjects worthy of the front pages, the months of hard work and attentiveness that their portrayal demanded. And they claim our attention in return.
Figure 1. Keiskamma Art Project, Keiskamma Altarpiece (2005). The closed altarpiece.
Figure 2. Keiskamma Art Project, Keiskamma Altarpiece (2005). The middle panels.
Figure 3. Keiskamma Art Project, Keiskamma Altarpiece (2005). The fully opened/third panels.
When the panels are opened to the mid-section (Fig. 2), a riotous, almost frenetic scene erupts. The only resemblance to the Isenheim to be found is the panel on the far right, where a whirling ball of village landscape plays the primary role—echoing the ball of luminescence that arises with Christ in a blazing resurrection. Rather than the life of Christ stories told on the Isenheim, the Keiskamma Altarpiece is wild, teeming with life, in striking contrast to the first panels. A giant fig tree dominates the panel on the left, with figures of animals and villagers flanking it; on the middle panels, village life is displayed in all its richness, with church and various religious figures near the top, and again angels and birds in flight. The largest figures on this panel are women in their church uniforms, blue and red, Anglican and Methodist, and the other half of the panel is a detailed scene of a traditional Xhosa ceremony—the slaughtering of a cow. A fire burns, and figures are dressed in traditional clothes; a group clusters around the houses of the families and celebrates. The other middle panel is taken up by the only prominent male appearing on the Altarpiece. It is a local man by the name of Gaba, a mystic, prophetic figure who is shown running up and down the dunes in a red dress he wears in solidarity with the women in the village. He marks patterns in the wet sand as an act of prayer for the village. Everything in this middle section of the Keiskamma Altarpiece teems, from sprawling fig tree to dogs and birds and flying fish, as if in defiance of the stupefying grief of the first panel-pages. Here is life, the celebration of it, the dream of it, in its richness and beauty.
Open the central panels again and this last layer (Fig. 3), brings a sense of balance back to the artwork. As in the Isenheim Altarpiece, the final panels are a different medium: the medieval artwork is made of wooden statues by Nikolaus von Hagenau, flanked by two painted panels and a golden filigree of metalwork at the top. The Keiskamma Altarpiece surprises with enormous sepia-toned photographs of three women from the area, made by Tanya Jordaan: Susan Paliso reappears, Eunice Mangwane is at the centre, and next to her is Caroline Nyongo, surrounded by grandchildren. Above them hang intricately beaded leaves and branches, acacia tree thorns and bright birds. Here are grandmothers: survivor-witnesses.
Their strength and solidity are unmistakable. On the panels that surround the women, runs the Keiskamma river and the ghosts of indigenous trees. And woven into the waters and the leaves, running throughout, are names, said aloud in stitch. These are the names of the beloved dead, said/stitched in remembrance for the first time in the community, in order to begin to tell the painful truth about what has killed so many here. What was un-namable now seen, now heard.
For a story to survive as testament, it must continue to address. What the reader/rememberer is here called to do with a testament is keep it from disappearing as testament—and this means responding to its call, performing this response by exposing to others my exposure to its demands. (Roger Simon, The touch of the past: Remembrance, learning and ethics)[26]
I first saw the Keiskamma Altarpiece in 2006 at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto, Ontario and I have been attempting to respond to its testamentary call ever since. What I continue to be haunted by—as the trees in the last panels are haunted—are the missing stories and ongoing silence about the millions who died a disregarded death because of AIDS in South Africa. Why is the memory of mass death due to disease so often only a footnote in history and in memory studies? When we know that the social conditions that contribute to this happening are the same as those that have caused other histories of violence: racism, sexism, imperialism, colonisation and exploitation.
Future studies using Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory may be helpful in this regard. [27] Rothberg uses the term multidirectional memory to argue for the complex connections between the legacies of the Holocaust and colonialism and calls for an opening up of other segregated histories and their memories. He suggests that making connections and comparisons in the creation of memory can be a powerful force for social justice work: that rather than being reductive in nature, this kind of memory work is productive, imaginative and works to engender solidarities across time and place. The Keiskamma Altarpiece can perhaps be seen as engaging in a kind of multidirectional dialogue with the medieval art work and community of disease sufferers. In the face of the enormous disparities of wealth, health and opportunity in South Africa, as in other places around the world, this kind of social justice memory work is desperately needed.
Conclusion
In this essay, I have outlined the impact of racism, sexism, colonisation—and the post-colonial aftermath of these forces—on the unparalleled spread of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. While AIDS affects the entire population and has killed millions of people, these deaths are not publicly mourned or remembered. The Keiskamma Altarpiece is an example of artwork made by a community of women who seek social justice by telling a monumental story—one that pushes back at the silencing of women’s lives, and remembrance of disease. Overwhelming in its size and care-filled construction, it stands in defiance of systems in our world that would mark any lives as ungrievable.
Acknowledgments
“This is an ‘Original Manuscript’ of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education on 27 Sep 2021, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15595692.2021.1944088.
I would like to acknowledge the support of a Social Studies and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship while writing this article.
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[1] Roger Simon, The touch of the past: Remembrance, learning and ethics (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 9.
[2] James William Daschuk, Clearing the plains: Disease, politics of starvation, and the loss of Aboriginal life (University of Regina Press, 2013), IX.
[3] See Mahmood Mamdani. Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism (Wits University Press, 2017).
[4] Roger Simon, The touch of the past, 9.
[5] See Pumla Dineo Gqola, Rape: A South African nightmare (MF Books, 2016) and V. Tallis, Feminisms, HIV and AIDS: subverting power, reducing vulnerability (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
[6] See Didier Fassin, When bodies remember: experiences and politics of AIDS in South Africa. (University of California Press. 2007); Corinne Squire, HIV in South Africa: Talking about the big thing (Routledge, 2007); Ida Susser. AIDS, sex, and culture: Global politics and survival in southern Africa (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); and V. Tallis, Feminisms, HIV and AIDS: subverting power, reducing vulnerability (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
[7] See Puleng Segalo, ‘Embroidery as narrative: Black South African women's experiences of suffering and healing,’ Agenda 28, no.1 (2014), 44–53 and ‘Using cotton, needles and threads to break the women’s silence: Embroideries as a decolonising framework,’ International Journal of Inclusive Education 20, no. 3 (2016), 246–260.
[8] See Brenda Schmahmann, ‘A framework for recuperation: HIV/AIDS and the Keiskamma Altarpiece, African Arts 43, no. 3 (2010), 34–51; ‘After Bayeux: The Keiskamma Tapestry and the making of South African history.’ Textile 9, no. 2, (2011), 158–192; and ‘Patching up a community in distress,’ African Arts 48, no. 4 (2015), 6–21.
[9] Roger Simon, The touch of the past: Remembrance, learning and ethics (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 9.
[10] See Deborah Posel, ‘History as confession: The case of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.’ Public Culture 20, no. 1 (2008), 119–141.
[11] See Kylie Thomas, Impossible mourning: HIV/AIDS and visuality after apartheid (Bucknell University Press, 2014).
[12] L. Farley. ‘Radical hope: Or, the problem of uncertainty in history education,’ Curriculum Inquiry 39, no. 4 (2009), 539.
[13] See Jan Assmann, ‘Memory, individual and collective,’ in R.E. Goodin & C. Tilly, eds., The Oxford handbook of contextual political analysis (Oxford University Press, 2008), 219, 218.
[14] Ibid, 219.
[15] Ibid, 220.
[16] Judith Butler, Frames of war: When is life grievable? (Verso, 2016), 39.
[17] See UNAIDS (2020, August 3), South Africa, https://www.unaids.org/en/regionscountries/countries/southafrica.
[18] See Didier Fassin, When bodies remember: experiences and politics of AIDS in South Africa. (University of California Press. 2007) and Kylie Thomas, Impossible mourning: HIV/AIDS and visuality after apartheid (Bucknell University Press, 2014).
[19] See J. Birnbaum, C. Murray, & R. Lozano, Exposing misclassified HIV/AIDS deaths in South Africa, Bulletin of the World Health Organization 89 (2011), 278–285.
[20] Kylie Thomas, Impossible mourning: HIV/AIDS and visuality after apartheid (Bucknell University Press, 2014), 5.
[21] See Annie E. Coombes, ‘Positive living: Visual activism and art in HIV/AIDS rights campaigns,’ Journal of Southern African Studies 45, no.1 (2019), 143–174.
[22] See Annie E. Coombes, ‘Positive living: Visual activism and art in HIV/AIDS rights campaigns,’ Journal of Southern African Studies 45, no.1 (2019), 143–174 and Brenda Schmahmann, ‘A framework for recuperation: HIV/AIDS and the Keiskamma Altarpiece, African Arts 43, no. 3 (2010), 34–51; ‘After Bayeux: The Keiskamma Tapestry and the making of South African history. Textile 9, no. 2, (2011), 158–192; and ‘Patching up a community in distress,’ African Arts 48, no. 4 (2015), 6–21.
[23] See Puleng Segalo, Embroidery as narrative: Black South African women's experiences of suffering and healing, Agenda 28, no 1 (2014), 44–53 and ‘Using cotton, needles and threads to break the women’s silence: Embroideries as a decolonising framework.’ International Journal of Inclusive Education, 20, no. 3 ((2016), 246–260.
[24] John Berger, ‘Between two Colmars,’ in About Looking (Pantheon Books, 1980), 131.
[25] See Roger Simon, The touch of the past: Remembrance, learning, and ethics. (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005)
[26] Roger Simon, The touch of the past: Remembrance, learning, and ethics (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 151.
[27] See Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2009).
